Global temperature charts

A week ago I got into an argument with a friend about global warming, which annoyed me at first but was probably a good thing, because it led to us Googling temperature data, where I found these two charts on Wikipedia:

The take-away from these two images is:

Temperatures are the highest they’ve been in 2000 years.

While there’s more uncertainty on the 12,000 year time frame, it’s plausible that temperatures are the highest they’ve ever been on that time frame too.

Even if temperatures aren’t the highest they’ve been in 12,000 years, when you look at things on that timescale, the trend line for the recent past looks almost vertical, which hasn’t happened before and should tell you something.

So as the result of an annoying argument with a friend, I now have my global warming equivalent of this image.